1. Field of the Invention
The invention is in the field of computerized networked insurance methods, with a specific emphasis on methods to allow average insurance purchasers to rapidly and easily model various insurance loss scenarios, evaluate how various insurance plans operate under such scenarios, and make better informed purchase decisions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Insurance policies usually provide various types of coverage benefits (e.g. vehicle insurance, home insurance, business insurance, life insurance, property insurance, and various types of health insurance such as hospitalization benefits, ambulance benefits, emergency care benefits and the like). Although prior art computerized systems exist whereby a consumer (user) may use a web browser to access a server and purchase insurance, these prior art systems do not provide enough comparative information and ability to construct alternative scenarios to enable a consumer or user to make a fully informed purchasing decision.
Thus at present, a consumer might purchase an insurance policy with a low premium without clearly understanding the various types of coverage benefits provided by the insurance policy, possible inadequate coverage under some scenarios, and the costs the consumer might incur when it is time to file a claim.
As a result, the consumer might end up paying a higher cost at the time of filing a claim. Alternatively, the consumer may purchase more insurance than is likely to be needed under most realistic scenarios, and end up spending too much in insurance premiums as a result. Both outcomes are unsatisfactory.
These problems are particularly acute when the consumer wishes to purchase insurance, such as vehicle, business, life, property or health insurance, in a country other than that of the consumer's country of origin (usually the country of the consumer's citizenship). This is because consumers accustomed to the price structures in their country of origin may be quite unfamiliar with the very differing price structures in other countries, and thus may either under purchase insurance (e.g. not purchase sufficient insurance) or alternatively waste money by purchasing much more coverage than is actually needed.
Here, unfortunately, the fact that average consumers were often ignorant of the true probability of various adverse scenarios, and the costs incurred by these various adverse scenarios, tended to benefit insurance companies. That is, given that the insurance companies themselves used sophisticated actuarial techniques to keep on top of these issues, the fact that their customers were ignorant may have tended to benefit the insurance companies, thus providing little incentive to correct this problem.
In any event, prior art in this area was generally entirely one country based, and there was little emphasis on helping average customers (as opposed to insurance actuaries) make better informed purchasing decisions. Prior art in this area includes Howell, US patent publication 2009/0276247 entitled “Systems and methods for web-based group insurance/benefits procurement and/or administration”. Other prior art with this type of single country focus includes Jinks, US patent publication 2002/0055862, entitled “Systems and methods for interactively evaluating a commercial insurance risk”; and Lind, US patent publication 2006/0248008, entitled “Method of evaluating a benefit plan”.